by J. S. Bailey
Dalton shrugged. “I can’t keep an eye on you twenty-eight hours a day unless you’re on my payroll.”
Chumley’s shoulders drooped. “I don’t have a way around this, do I?”
“Not unless you can conjure up a shuttle ticket—and I’m not buying you one; I gave you enough money already. Now what do you want for dinner?”
Dalton fried up four beef patties slathered in Worcestershire sauce and chopped onions, pondering the various sorts of trainings he’d have to put his guest through. He’d lent Chumley an old shirt in addition to the shorts, and the conman sat at Dalton’s table with his head in his hands, devoid of all hope.
“So, when do I start my training?” Chumley asked as Dalton set a plate in front of him five minutes later.
“First thing in the morning. You’ll come with me to the station and I’ll get you a badge so people know not to mess with you. Need ketchup?”
Chumley eyed his beef patties, sitting on buns Dalton had bought fresh from the bakery earlier in the week, and said, “Yes, please.”
Dalton grabbed the ketchup from the fridge and plunked it on the table, then bit into his own patty sandwich. After swallowing, he said, “I’ll take you out to the firing range before lunch tomorrow and see how well you can aim a water pistol. It’s my favorite way of dealing with them.”
Chumley’s brows knit together. “You squirt water at them?”
“Weed killer. It’s less risky than flamethrowers or boomstones. You saw what flamethrowers did to the hotel.”
“What you’re saying is, these plants have caused trouble before.”
“Not often, but often enough. Until this week, it’d been a year or so since I had to deal with one. It got tangled in some fencing outside a homestead about five kilometers south of here. They called me in to put it out of its misery.”
“I’m in hell.” Chumley shoved his plate away from him and ran his hands through his hair.
“You’ve got the climate about right. Being on the force around here isn’t that bad, though. We can go weeks at a time without any major incidents.”
Dalton’s comm, which had been laying on the countertop next to the range, squawked to life as if on cue. “Dalton? You there?”
It was Cadu, of course. Dalton snatched up the device. “What is it now?”
“Gwendolyn Goldfarb is causing some problems over on the corner of Broadway and Cactus. Just come over and give her a good talking to. She might actually listen to you.”
We’ll see about that, Dalton thought. “All right,” he said. “We’ll be there soon.”
“We?” Cadu asked, but Dalton had already pocketed the comm.
“Well, Deputy, it seems we have a job to do.” Dalton bared his teeth in a grin and shoved his plate into the refrigerator. “Think you can handle it?”
Chumley groaned.
Shadows began to grow long, and the temperature had started its much-needed evening plummet by the time Dalton ushered a whining Chumley out the door.
“They’re going to kill me as soon as they see me!” he said as Dalton led him around to the parked quad.
“Not if you stay with me.”
“I don’t have a badge yet!”
“If anybody kills you, I’ll see to it myself that they’re force-fed to the Greens. Now get on.”
Chumley made an unmanly noise and mounted the quad. This time Dalton got on in front of him and said, “You might want to hang on.”
Dalton gunned the quad out of his yard. He felt Chumley’s hands instinctively latch onto the back of his trench coat. A few onlookers gawked as Dalton navigated the grid of streets, and they came at last upon a scene most surreal.
Dalton dismounted on Cactus Street, frowning.
Behind him, Chumley said, “What the hell?”
Gwendolyn Goldfarb, whom Dalton had nearly flattened in the street that very morning, stood in the center of the thoroughfare with her arms spread wide and her head thrown back, as if awaiting a flying saucer to come along and beam her up. Her hat was gone, but now she wore a neon orange shawl over her kaftan that made Dalton’s eyes hurt.
“Stay close,” Dalton muttered to Chumley, then approached the old woman with caution.
Her lips were moving. Faint words spilled from them.
“Worlds of hurt,” she breathed. “So much pain, and for what? They teem, they thrive, but for how long? Save us!” Her voice rose in pitch until she nearly screamed the final word. “Save us all! They’re coming!”
Her words chilled Dalton’s veins into ice. “Who’s coming, Gwendolyn?”
She didn’t even acknowledge his presence. Her eyes appeared to have rolled back into her head, showing only the whites. “It will be death to us all.”
“What does she mean?” Chumley worried, lingering near Dalton’s side. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She got lost in the desert a few years back and lost her mind. She’s always going on like this.”
“Should we get her to a doctor?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Dalton stepped forward and put a hand on Gwendolyn’s arm. She flinched and peered at him with dark eyes. “Sheriff Kane!” she exclaimed. “Fancy seeing you here! What am I doing in the center of the street?”
“You said something is coming.”
“I did?” She blinked at him like someone stepping into the sunlight after a long day indoors.
“What’s coming?” Chumley asked. “Is it more of the . . . the Greens?”
Gwendolyn drew back a step. “How should I know what the Greens are doing?” She brushed a smudge of sand off the front of her shawl, turned tail, and sauntered off past several bewildered onlookers as if nothing unusual had just happened.
Dalton strode over to Helmut Jones, a teller at his bank, who stared after Gwendolyn in astonishment. “What was she saying before we got here?” Dalton demanded.
Helmut scratched at his beard. “I couldn’t hear much, but I think she said something about lights.”
“Lights?”
“She’s crazy, Sheriff. You know that.”
Dalton frowned after Gwendolyn’s dwindling figure. She’d said something before that niggled at the back of his mind. He rewound his thoughts past rescuing Chumley from Wax Street, past the hotel fire and the attack at Falcon Ranch, and let out a small gasp.
“Fire in the sky!” Gwendolyn had cried outside the supermarket during Dalton’s walk to clear his head after the salad incident. It seemed she had shouted it almost continuously from the moment he’d caught sight of her until he’d rounded the corner onto another street.
The very next evening, Hotel Richport had gone up in flames.
Surely it was a coincidence.
But what if it wasn’t?
They’re coming, Gwendolyn had said just now. It will be death to us all.
Dalton let out a curse.
“What is it?” Chumley asked.
Some of the people near them had spotted Chumley, who sported two black eyes from the assault over on Wax Street. Dalton made a point of looking menacing so they would stay away from his reluctant deputy. “We need to alert the new city watch,” Dalton said, pulling out his comm. “Right now.”
The sun had dipped below the horizon by the time Errin Inglewood and an assortment of armed citizens met up with Dalton and Chumley just to the north of town.
Dalton had retrieved two pairs of night vision goggles from the police station and passed one to Errin.
Errin slipped the goggles into place over their eyes, the straps making their sand-colored hair stick up in tufts. “I’m not sure I understand the point of this. We already have three volunteers patrolling the perimeter.”
“Call it a very good hunch,” Dalton grunted. “The town was attacked just after nightfall last night. I won’t let it happen again. Str
ength in numbers, you know.”
“Shouldn’t we have extra people posted on all sides of town, then? Not just the north?”
“North is where most of that smoke is.” He snapped his own goggles on and withdrew his loaded water pistol. “If more Greens are coming, that’s the direction they’ll be coming from.” His heart stuttered, and he turned so Errin couldn’t see the fear on his face.
Dalton felt a tap on his shoulder. “Erm, Sheriff?”
“What?”
“I can’t see anything.” Chumley coughed lightly. “How am I supposed to kill a Green when I can’t even see?”
“I was getting to that. Errin?” Dalton nodded toward Carolyn’s aide, who picked up a giant bulb mounted on a tripod to show to Chumley, who of course couldn’t see it.
“The moment Dalton or I see movement out here, we flick on the floodlight and take the Greens by surprise,” Errin said. “Then we fire.”
“Won’t the floodlight overload those goggles? And won’t it blind the rest of us, since our eyes aren’t adjusted to light?”
Chumley’s worried expression appeared a sallow green through the goggles. He held his own water pistol at his side, barrel pointed toward the ground. Weed killer trickled from it in a slow drip.
“Errin, could I talk to you alone for a minute?” Dalton asked.
They nodded. “Certainly, Sheriff.”
The two of them stepped away from Chumley and the four other volunteers they’d rounded up.
“The salesman is right,” Errin said in a low tone, looking up at him. “If we use the floodlight, we might incapacitate ourselves. I say you and I keep these on—” they tapped at their goggles— “and tell everyone exactly where to fire the moment we see a Green.”
“Too much could go wrong that way.”
“It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we can do on such short notice.”
Visions of bloodthirsty leaves and branches flashed through Dalton’s head, and he counted to ten while drawing slow breaths so he wouldn’t have a panicked meltdown in front of everyone. “Right,” he said at length. “No floodlight, then. You hear that, everyone?” he called back at the others. “We’re not using the floodlight. If Errin or I say fire, start firing.”
Luckily, all of them were armed with water pistols, so accidentally shooting a comrade would not result in immediate combustion.
He and Errin rejoined the others. His heart thudded harder as he imagined the leafy hordes charging toward them under cover of darkness, and his mind’s eye replayed the beasts clambering over picnic tables and around playground equipment while screams rent the air.
Dolls and action figures had lain abandoned on the ground. Sand castles had been flattened among puddles of blood.
He forced his eyes back open, not realizing he’d closed them.
He was a different man now.
He could do this.
But can you? a little voice asked inside of him. Because that salad . . .
“Errin, keep your eyes peeled,” Dalton barked. “Chumley, you come and stand beside me. Joe and Edith, you take up positions on the other side of Errin. Abdul, you stand on the other side of Chumley, and Helen, you stand between me and Errin.”
Someone let out a sob, and Dalton was startled to realize it wasn’t Chumley, but Joe, who ran a repair shop over on Sunrise Street.
“Are you going to be all right?” Dalton asked him in a low voice.
“I don’t know.” Joe’s voice quavered. The man kept his gaze fixed straight ahead toward the open desert. “I thought I could do this, but . . . but then I remembered Piney Gulch. Your cousin Darius was a good friend of mine.”
Dalton nodded in understanding. “You can go home, if you want. I won’t make anyone do anything they’re not comfortable with.”
“Except for me,” Chumley snapped, his tone bitter.
“I’ll stay,” Joe said. “I want to help. My neighbor’s in intensive care after the hotel attack. It’s the least I can do.”
“Okay, then.” Dalton squared his shoulders. “If Errin or I say to fire, you know what to do.”
The seven of them fell silent and waited.
Dalton kept his eyes wide, scanning the horizon from left to right and back again. Nothing moved out there except the low-growing desert scrub, which was not nearly lush enough to ever be confused for the enemy.
An hour passed. Dalton heard Chumley’s stomach growl. He remembered they hadn’t finished their dinners.
Errin withdrew their comm from their pocket and spoke into it in low tones. “Marshall, are you picking up anything yet?”
“Negative,” came the voice of one of the mobile patrols scouting around the edge of the city. “It’s deader out here than Crypt Valley. You?”
“Same,” Errin said. “Where are you?”
“Southwest side, close to the Rosa. I haven’t seen a thing.”
“Just keep your eyes open,” Errin said, throwing Dalton a glance.
“I’m getting tired, and I have to be up for work in five hours.”
“Just keep looking, Marshall. If you don’t see anything else in the next hour, you can go home.”
Dalton could hear Marshall’s grumble loud and clear on the night air. Errin tapped at the buttons on the comm and said, “Ash? Do you see anything yet?”
“Nope,” the comm replied. “You?”
“Not a thing. What’s your current position?”
“I’m just now passing the ballfields. There’s a stray cat slinking around out here, but nothing bigger than that.”
“Excellent. Keep us posted if you see anything else.”
“Will do.”
Errin then proceeded to call yet another one of the citizens patrolling the perimeter. “Maxine? How are things over your way?”
The comm emitted only silence.
“Maxine, do you copy?”
Dalton’s chest tightened. Maxine had been toting a flamethrower nearly as long as she was tall the last he’d seen her. If she’d met some sort of foul play . . .
“Maxine, do you copy?” Errin repeated, their tone growing more anxious. Then they swore. “Her comm must be out of order.”
“What if it isn’t?” Joe asked. “What if they’ve got her?”
Errin tapped more buttons on the comm. “Marshall, it’s me again. Have you heard from Maxine?”
“Can’t say I have,” Marshall replied. “Is something wrong?”
“She isn’t answering her comm.”
“I’ll try her and see if it works for me.” Marshall fell silent, and thirty agonizing seconds later, his voice came on again. “I’ve got nothing, but I’ll be on the lookout for her.”
Sweat ran down Dalton’s scalp even though the temperature outside had grown quite pleasant.
Save us all! They’re coming! Gwendolyn had wailed.
The woman knew something, no doubt about that. But how did she know? What was her source of information? Did she even know she knew?
He was peripherally aware of Errin contacting Ash, who also had not seen Maxine during the past couple of hours.
Out on the horizon, something that wasn’t desert scrub moved.
Dots sparkled on the edges of his vision.
Don’t faint, he ordered himself.
“Errin, look,” he whispered, and nodded straight ahead of him.
Errin put away their comm and drew in a short breath. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure.”
Whatever it was appeared low to the ground, perhaps half a kilometer in front of them. It held still, then made a quick if lopsided lurch toward the right.
“Is it a juvenile Green?” Errin asked. “It’s not tall enough to be an adult.”
“I don’t know.” Dalton fiddled with a button on the side of his goggles and zoomed in as
far as it would go. Under night vision, the thing looked chartreuse and somewhat plastic bag-shaped.
An underdeveloped juvenile, perhaps—or even a baby?
He had to find out.
“Stay,” Dalton ordered his comrades in a low tone, then crept forward with his water pistol at the ready.
His heart climbed higher into his throat with each step. He reminded himself he was doing this for the eight thousand souls in the sleeping city behind him.
Up ahead, the object had grown stationary and only fluttered at sporadic moments, coinciding with the soft gusts of wind susurrating over the rocky ground.
Dalton narrowed his eyes and held his water pistol in a two-handed grip in front of him as he continued his cautious approach.
Twenty steps later, he saw why the object looked like a plastic bag.
It was a plastic bag.
Which had snagged on a wiry desert bush.
PAM’S PLEASURE PALACE, read the block letters printed on the side, and below that in smaller print read, Where everyone goes home a winner.
Bloodcurdling screams cut through the air behind him, and the view through the goggles went blank.
Blinding light lanced his corneas when Dalton tore the goggles from his face. He tried in vain to blink the tortuous afterimage from his vision and sprinted blindly toward his companions, using the sounds of their dying agony to guide him.
Through the afterimage, he watched a tongue of flame lick horizontally through the night.
Flame?
When Dalton was fifteen meters from Chumley, Errin, and the others, the screams morphed into cries of outrage.
“What do you think you’re doing?” a woman shrieked.
“I . . . oh, gosh, sorry!” Someone made a spluttering, retching sound. “I didn’t think . . . ”
Though the floodlight still dazzled Dalton’s eyes, he could see enough now to tell that Errin stood with their hands on their knees, and Maxine, the missing city watch volunteer, stood close by brandishing a smoking flamethrower. The ground smoldered a meter away from them.
“What happened back here?” Dalton demanded. “Who turned on that light?”
